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evidence of “contact with the underground.” 28 For the wrong joke, told in the wrong place at the wrong time, one could even be arrested, not only in the 1950s but later on as well. This was the premise of Milan Kundera’s 1967 novel
The Joke
, the book that first gained the Czech writer an international audience: its protagonist writes a joke on a postcard to a girl, and is thrown out of the party and sent to work in the mines as a result. 29 In 1961, members of an East German cabaret troupe really were arrested after a performance titled
Where the Dog’s Buried
, which included the following skit:
    Two of the actors start dismantling a wall, brick by brick. “What are you doing?” asks a third. “We’re tearing down the walls of the brick factory!” they reply. “Why are you doing that? There’s a shortage of bricks!” the other responds. Exactly, say the two labourers, continuing with their work. “That’s why we’re dismantling the walls!”
    The cabaret also featured a bureaucrat who answered every question with a quotation fromWalter Ulbricht, “just to be absolutely on the safe side.” It was all rather clumsy, but the authorities were not amused. In the report filed afterward, a local party boss fumed, “the show consisted of provocative defamations of the press, workers, Party officials, and youth leaders.” The actors remained in jail for nine months, during which time several of them were isolated in solitary confinement. Much later, one of them discovered that hundreds of his jokes had been reported to the secret police. 30
    The incident illustrates the distinct absence of a communist sense of humor. It also underlines the delicate balance that had to be struck by satirists, cabaret artists, and others who wanted to perform legally. On the one hand, they had to be funny, or at least pointed and sharp, if they were to attract an audience. On the other hand, they had to avoid telling the jokes that people around them were actually telling or even alluding to the topics that others found so amusing. Official media faced the same dilemma. Hungarian state radio made an attempt at tackling this problem in 1950 with the launch ofa political cabaret. Their aim was clear: “Every good laugh is a blow to the enemy. The new program will radiate the optimistic joy and strength of our society.” The program lasted two months and was then abandoned. 31
    Almost no one in the Eastern bloc wrestled with this problem in the Stalinist period so diligently asHerbert Sandberg, theBuchenwald survivor who became the editor of
Ulenspiegel
, briefly East Germany’s funny satirical magazine. Although the magazine’s offices were originally located in West Berlin and the magazine was first registered under an American license, Sandberg’s superb team of artists and writers all came from the intellectual left, and from the beginning they were close to the Kulturbund and the communist party. Sandberg himself was not at all ideological, however. He regarded laughter as “healing,” and believed he could play a role in reconstructing society if he and his colleagues focused their sharp pens on caricatures of Germany’s Nazi past and its present division.
    At least to begin with,
Ulenspiegel
very much reflected Sandberg’s sensibility. The January 1, 1947, issue contained, among other things, a satirical article about Adenauer, a review of an underrated exhibit of children’s books (no one was talking about the exhibit in overserious Berlin because “it’s about fun and love and magic”), and a critical piece about Wilhelm Furtwängler, the conductor who had stayed in Germany during the war and kept silent about Nazi atrocities. There were cartoons criticizing the moribund denazification process (“Are there really no Nazi party members left?”) and much open discussion of the Third Reich. A few months later, Sandberg’s ambivalence about the deepening division of Germany and of Berlin was reflected in the May